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The summer movie season unofficially kicks off this weekend (meaning that, at this rate, it should be up to launching in early April by 2020) and, if you have happened to glance at my comments in Monday Morning Quarterback in recent months, you will not be surprised to hear me once again bemoan how completely unexcited I am with the majority of the 40+ major studio releases cutting a swath through the multiplexes between now and Labor Day. In a week or so, BOP will be compiling the votes of the site’s staffers to come up with the annual rankings of the 25 summer films we are most excited about/passionate about/feeling great warmth in our loins towards.

For my part, I struggled to come up with the top 10 picks required of me. In the end, my list is comprised of six major releases of varying blockbuster-ness and four “smaller” films in varying shades of artiness. (If I could have determined whether or not Lars Von Trier’s supremely nutty looking Melancholia was officially going to open this summer in the United States, that might have made my voting at least a little more interesting. Check out the international trailer, complete with full female nudity, two generations of Skarsgaards, AND Kiefer Sutherland, for what looks to be Von Trier’s 2012).

I won’t go and spoil my picks before BOP publishes the results, but I will admit that the overall lack of luster of the 2011 crop is what compels me to look back this week to summers past (2003 and 2004, specifically) to a pair of Chapter Twos from two of the biggest franchises of the ‘00s. This week, in the cage, it’s Spider-Man 2 vs. X2. Or, if you prefer to frame it in soundtrack terms (music in the film only!): Dashboard Confessional and Michael Buble vs. Conjure One featuring Poe and, um, *NSYNC? How do these middle installments stack up against one another? Does radioactive blood trump adamantium cosmetic surgery? Let’s stand them head-to-head in some key categories.

Tale of the Tape (Budgets, Grosses, Running Times, Etc.)

X-Men helped kick off a decade of supreme commercial viability for super-hero and comic book adaptations of all stripes with its $54 million opening and $157 million domestic tally in the summer of 2000. Two years later, Spider-Man exploded out of the gate with the first-ever $100 million plus weekend on its way to over $400 million in North America. Respectively, the web-slinger and Wolverine et al. grossed $2.5 billion and $1.1 billion worldwide with their trilogies — I am not counting X-Men Origins: Wolverine in that tally — against budgets that were surpassing $200 million by the time the third installments rolled around. I find it of note that only Spider-Man 3 made significantly more overseas than it did in North America. That exception aside, both franchises have tended to make slightly more than half of their hauls on the domestic front, a rarity in an age where many exportable Hollywood blockbusters can pull in anywhere from two-thirds to three-fourths of their final gross from foreign theaters.

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